Very early in his stay in Prussia the indefatigable Voltaire had begun learning a little of the despised German language—of which, says Morley, he never knew more “than was needed to curse a postilion.” To correct the King’s works, he needed none. By October 28, 1750, he was busy overseeing the second edition of Frederick’s history of his country, written in French and entitled “Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg,” and trying to modify the royal author’s round abuse of his own grandfather. But Frederick only loved truth the better if it burnt. “After all,” said Voltaire with a shrug of his lean shoulders, “he is your grandfather, not mine; do as you like with him.”
The critic was not generally so accommodating, however. He was not a critic pour rire. He gave himself an enormous amount of work. He ran a thousand risks of offending his royal pupil. He cavilled at this, queried that, suggested endlessly. The manuscript of “Aux Prussiens” is still extant, with remarks in Voltaire’s little handwriting all over it. His minuteness and care were extraordinary. It would have been at least a hundred times easier for him to have praised lavishly and indifferently. Any author will accept flattery—on trust. It is only for blame and disagreement that the critic must give clear reason and proof; and chapter and verse for his alterations and amendments. If Voltaire had been a toady and had not loved his art better than all monarchs, he would have wasted much less of his dearly prized time in “rounding off a little the works of the King of Prussia.” His “official fidelity, frankness, and rigorous strictness” are a high testimony to his character. “The Art of War” is a much more ambitious work than “To the Prussians” and was subjected to the same relentless criticism. The eager critic wanted, he said, to enable his royal master to do without his help. Sometimes Frederick would leave a wrong word purposely. “We must give him the pleasure of finding some fault,” he wrote to Darget. But on the whole he accepted not only verbal emendations, but alterations of his very opinions with a generosity and fairness which prove the true royalty of the royal soul. This quick, thorough, breathless, aggravating schoolmaster would be satisfied with nothing less than his pupil’s best. If a man could be made a great writer without being born one, Frederick the Great’s literary efforts would not be mouldering in the libraries to-day.
The reconciliation between the teacher and the taught seems for a while to have been complete. The worry of the Hirsch affair had made Voltaire really ill. But Frederick was all goodness to the sufferer. He had a room kept for his use at Sans-Souci. Formey records how one day he went to the Marquisat to call upon Voltaire and found him in bed. “What is the matter with you?” “Four mortal diseases,” answers the invalid. “Your eyes look nice and bright though,” says the ill-advised Formey, meaning consolation. “And don’t you know,” shouts the sick man with all his strength, “that in scurvy people die with their eyes inflamed?” It must be conceded that though Voltaire never allowed his ailments to stop his work, he liked to have full credit for them, and took care never to be ill without impressing upon his friends that he was dying. All the same, he began to attend those gay, frugal, philosophical little suppers once more—and was once more permitted to dispense with the ponderous dinners. Yet once more too, except for that ill-health, the life here was all he dreamed it. Frederick wrote him little friendly notes—“I have just given birth to six twins.... The ‘Henriade’ is engaged to be their godmother. Come to the father’s room at six o’clock this evening”—the six twins being six cantos of “The Art of War.” And Voltaire would answer, “Sire, you have the cramp, and so have I; you love solitude, and so do I.” The pair were again as lovers, in fact; writing nothings, only for the sake of writing something. The winter was past, and the summer blossoming again.
The trip to Italy, postponed from the autumn of 1750, had been arranged to take place in this May of 1751, but was finally abandoned altogether; partly on account of the Inquisition, but partly also, it may be surmised, because Frederick having found Voltaire again, was in no mind to lose him.
Through the summer host and guest were hard at work with their respective secretaries. Both knew at least one of the receipts for happiness. Prussia was heaven. Only—only—there was a delightful earth called Paris where d’Argental was doing his vigorous best to get the authorities to permit the performance of “Mahomet”—an earth from which he wrote on August 6th of this 1751, one last, long, pleading appeal to Voltaire to return, while he could yet return, with honour. Madame Denis, resolved not to join her uncle in Prussia, added her entreaties. The foolish woman, who had a tendresse for handsome young Baculard d’Arnaud in the days when he was her uncle’s protégé in Paris, was now coquetting with a certain Marquis de Ximenès, or Chimenès, as Voltaire called him, and less minded than ever to leave the capital.
The wild La Mettrie, too, was for ever calling on Voltaire—volubly homesick for Paris himself. Voltaire would have gone, perhaps; but in August his “Louis XIV.” was actually in the press of Berlin, he had a hundred prospective engagements, and—he thought Frederick was his friend.
It was at the end of this same month of August that La Mettrie, calling on Voltaire, swore to him that he had heard Frederick say of him: “I shall want him at the most another year: one squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.” Voltaire would not believe the story. La Mettrie redoubled his oaths. Voltaire wrote the scene to Madame Denis on September 2d in his quick, vivid fashion. “Do you believe it? Ought I to believe it ... after sixteen years of goodness ... when I am sacrificing all for him?... I shall be justly condemned for having yielded to so many caresses.... What shall I do? Ignore what La Mettrie has told me, tell nobody but you, forget it, wait?” If Voltaire thought he really could do these things, he could have known little of his own character. He did try to forget. But that rind of an orange! It rankled, it rankled. Could Frederick have said it? Impossible! But he had written the “Anti-Machiavelli” and spilled blood in war like water; condoled piously with Darget and made an epigram on his wife; caressed d’Arnaud and ruined him. It made one thoughtful.
On September 30th “Mahomet” was successfully performed in Paris. That was another voice urging Voltaire to return.
“The orange rind haunts my dreams,” he wrote to Madame Denis again, on October 29th. “I try not to believe it.... We go to sup with the King and are gay enough sometimes. The man who fell from the top of a steeple and finding the falling through the air soft, said, ‘Good, provided it lasts,’ is not a little as I am.”
On November 11th, the tale-bearer, La Mettrie, died from having consumed a whole pâté (composed of eagle and pheasant, lard, pork and ginger!) at Lord Tyrconnel’s house. He would make mischief no more. But, then, he could not undo the mischief he had made. “I should like to have asked La Mettrie when he was dying,” Voltaire wrote sombrely to Madame Denis on Christmas Eve, “about that rind of an orange. That good soul, about to appear before God, would not have dared to lie. There is a great appearance that he spoke the truth.... The King told me yesterday ... that he would give me a province to have me near him. That does not look like the rind of an orange.”